I
HE had been out but once since his arrival, Mark Monteith; that was
the next day after--he had disembarked by night on the previous; then
everything had come at once, as he would have said, everything had
changed. He had got in on Tuesday; he had spent Wednesday for the most
part down town, looking into the dismal subject of his anxiety--the
anxiety that, under a sudden decision, had brought him across the
unfriendly sea at mid-winter, and it was through information reaching
him on Wednesday evening that he had measured his loss, measured above
all his pain. These were two distinct things, he felt, and, though both
bad, one much worse than the other. It wasn’t till the next three
days had pretty well ebbed, in fact, that he knew himself for so badly
wounded. He had waked up on Thursday morning, so far as he had slept at
all, with the sense, together, of a blinding New York blizzard and of a
deep sore inward ache. The great white savage storm would have kept him
at the best within doors, but his stricken state was by itself quite
reason enough.
He so felt the blow indeed, so gasped, before what had happened to him,
at the ugliness, the bitterness, and, beyond these things, the sinister
strangeness, that, the matter of his dismay little by little detaching
and projecting itself, settling there face to face with him as something
he must now live with always, he might have been in charge of some
horrid alien thing, some violent, scared, unhappy creature whom there
was small joy, of a truth, in remaining with, but whose behaviour
wouldn’t perhaps bring him under notice, nor otherwise compromise him,
so long as he should stay to watch it. A young jibbering ape of one of
the more formidable sorts, or an ominous infant panther, smuggled into
the great gaudy hotel and whom it might yet be important he shouldn’t
advertise, couldn’t have affected him as needing more domestic
attention. The great gaudy hotel--The Pocahontas, but carried out
largely on “Du Barry” lines--made all about him, beside, behind, below,
above, in blocks and tiers and superpositions, a sufficient defensive
hugeness; so that, between the massive labyrinth and the New York
weather, life in a lighthouse during a gale would scarce have kept
him more apart. Even when in the course of that worse Thursday it
had occurred to him for vague relief that the odious certified facts
couldn’t be all his misery, and that, with his throat and a probable
temperature, a brush of the epidemic, which was for ever brushing him,
accounted for something, even then he couldn’t resign himself to bed and
broth and dimness, but only circled and prowled the more within his
high cage, only watched the more from his tenth story the rage of the
elements.
In the afternoon he had a doctor--the caravanserai, which supplied
everything in quantities, had one for each group of so many rooms--just
in order to be assured that he was _grippé_ enough for anything. What
his visitor, making light of his attack, perversely told him was that
he was, much rather, “blue” enough, and from causes doubtless known
to himself--which didn’t come to the same thing; but he “gave him
something,” prescribed him warmth and quiet and broth and courage,
and came back the next day as to readminister this last dose. He then
pronounced him better, and on Saturday pronounced him well--all the more
that the storm had abated and the snow had been dealt with as New York,
at a push, knew how to deal with things. Oh, how New York knew how to
deal--to deal, that is, with other accumulations lying passive to its
hand--was exactly what Mark now ached with his impression of; so that,
still threshing about in this consciousness, he had on the Saturday
come near to breaking out as to what was the matter with him. The
Doctor brought in somehow the air of the hotel--which, cheerfully
and conscientiously, by his simple philosophy, the good man wished to
diffuse; breathing forth all the echoes of other woes and worries and
pointing the honest moral that, especially with such a thermometer,
there were enough of these to go round.
Our sufferer, by that time, would have liked to tell some one;
extracting, to the last acid strain of it, the full strength of his
sorrow, taking it all in as he could only do by himself and with the
conditions favourable at least to this, had been his natural first need.
But now, he supposed, he _must_ be better; there was something of his
heart’s heaviness he wanted so to give out. He had rummaged forth on the
Thursday night half a dozen old photographs stuck into a leather frame,
a small show-case that formed part of his usual equipage of travel--he
mostly set it up on a table when he stayed anywhere long enough; and in
one of the neat gilt-edged squares of this convenient portable array,
as familiar as his shaving-glass or the hair-brushes, of backs and
monograms now so beautifully toned and wasted, long ago given him by his
mother, Phil Blood-good handsomely faced him. Not contemporaneous, and
a little faded, but so saying what it said only the more dreadfully,
the image seemed to sit there, at an immemorial window, like some long
effective and only at last exposed “decoy” of fate. It was _because_ he
was so beautifully good-looking, because he was so charming and clever
and frank--besides being one’s third cousin, or whatever it was, one’s
early schoolfellow and one’s later college classmate--that one had
abjectly trusted him. To live thus with his unremoved, undestroyed,
engaging, treacherous face, had been, as our traveller desired, to live
with all of the felt pang; had been to consume it in such a single hot,
sore mouthful as would so far as possible dispose of it and leave but
cold dregs. Thus, if the Doctor, casting about for pleasantness, had
happened to notice him there, salient since he was, and possibly by the
same stroke even to know him, as New York--and more or less to its cost
now, mightn’t one say?--so abundantly and agreeable had, the cup would
have overflowed and Monteith, for all he could be sure of the contrary,
would have relieved himself positively in tears.
“Oh _he’s_ what’s the matter with me--that, looking after some of my
poor dividends, as he for the ten years of my absence had served me by
doing, he has simply jockeyed me out of the whole little collection,
such as it was, and taken the opportunity of my return, inevitably at
last bewildered and uneasy, to ‘sail,’ ten days ago, for parts unknown
and as yet unguessable. It isn’t the beastly values themselves, however;
that’s only awkward and I can still live, though I don’t quite know how
I shall turn round; it’s the horror of _his_ having done it, and done it
to _me_--without a mitigation or, so to speak, a warning or an excuse.”
That, at a hint or a jog, is what he would have brought out--only to
feel afterward, no doubt, that he had wasted his impulse and profaned
even a little his sincerity. The Doctor didn’t in the event so much
as glance at his cluster of portraits--which fact quite put before our
friend the essentially more vivid range of imagery that a pair of eyes
transferred from room to room and from one queer case to another, in
such a place as that, would mainly be adjusted to. It wasn’t for _him_
to relieve himself touchingly, strikingly or whatever, to such a
man: such a man might much more pertinently--save for professional
discretion--have emptied out there his own bag of wonders; prodigies
of observation, flowers of oddity, flowers of misery, flowers of the
monstrous, gathered in current hotel practice. Countless possibilities,
making doctors perfunctory, Mark felt, swarmed and seethed at their
doors; it showed for an incalculable world, and at last, on Sunday, he
decided to leave his room.